Alaska Reid has announced her debut album Disenchanter, co-produced with A. G. Cook. Out on July 14th via Luminelle Recordings, Disenchanter finds Reid straddling her two hometowns – her native Park County, Montana, and adopted city of Los Angeles – where she still splits her time and garners inspiration from them both to craft her brand of “Mountain Pop.” Written while touring (Reid has opened for the likes of Porches, Charli XCX, Magdalena Bay, Maya Hawke, and Caroline Polachek), Disenchanter draws on the deep traditions of American country songwriting, the big, gritty guitars of Northwestern grunge, and the unrushed ease of Southern California living, all complemented by the inventive production style of Cook.
To celebrate the album announcement, Alaska Reid shares the album’s lead single entitled “Back To This,” which was co-written with Cook. With glittering guitars and synthlines that could soundtrack the school dance scene in an eighties movie, “Back To This” was inspired by a hike in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, where Reid witnessed a group of forest service workers on a break. “It was late summer and they looked happy and dusty. It was like a painted reverie from a classical painting,” explains Reid. “I fantasize about other people’s lives, other people’s professions, and writing is a way I can approximate what it must be like to be someone else. So this song is about stumbling upon a scene in someone else’s life and wanting to be a part of it, but it’s also about wondering if I ever seemed as cool or as worthy as those smokejumpers did.I also had this idea of looking back at a photo and wondering why, at the time, I did not feel like the version of myself looking back in the photo.” The song’s lyrics reference the surreal bravery of smoke jumpers fighting wildfires in the mountain west, people in their twenties as beautiful in the waning light of day as the natural beauty surrounding them.
Like the songwriters Reid is most inspired by (she namechecks Joni Mitchell alongside Paul Westerberg and J Mascis) Disenchanter narrates a landscape of emotional states, some lived and others borrowed. “I read a lot of fantasy, and there’s a character I was introduced to called the Fiend Folio, who can absorb the power of magical objects by coming in contact with them, and in turn, drains the magic from them, disenchants them,” Reid says. “Maybe it’s morbid, but a writer takes an experience and turns it around and around, looking for what makes it worth paying attention to, what makes it enchanting, and in doing so, drains some of that magic and metabolizes it into something that belongs to them.” While Reid might consider herself a disenchanter, her work also does the inverse: it finds magic in everyday, passing moments, and memorializes them into something worth remembering.
Photo Courtesy: Audrey Hall
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